Trump: "Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in
the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can't even
breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way -
I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like
hell..."
Have you watched the GOP
in their solemn majesty,
dignified politicos
in their best convention clothes?
rigging the next election
how to evade detection?
Trump will do the trick
with some comedy shtik!
When Rome burns and
you're just fiddling
make a turn and
say you're kidding
they won't care
kidding on the square
When you've made an
awful gaffe go
try to trade it
for a laugh so
debonair
kidding on the square
When your lies are way too pestilential
telling them with humor is essential—
presidential!
When you're doing something Nazi
toss it to the paparazzi
make them stare,
kidding on the square.
Photo from "My First Day at Madrasa" by blogger
mattinindo, the guy in the necktie (he mentions it in the post), an English
teacher at the Madrasah Negari Aliya Lumajang, God's State Muslim School
in Lumajang, East Java, Indonesia in July 2012, writing about how a vice
principal introduces him to his new class: "'This is Mr. Mek. He is your
new English teacher from America. He lives on [blank] street near
Al-Huda Mosque. He doesn’t like to eat rice. He’s twenty-four and not
married. He’s not Muslim. And he’s not allowed to ride motorcycles.
Since he’s a native speaker you will all speak English fluently very
soon. Mr. Mek, come say something.' He’s beaming his pearly whites the
whole time." It's a lovely post.
Rudolph Giuliani in a
NewsMax interview
last Sunday explaining his view that New York mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani
should not attend the 9/11 25th anniversary commemoration (my transcription):
Frankly, whatever he'd like to say, he doesn't agree that September 11th
was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America... Having
lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends
me that he's coming.... This is not a place for people like the Arab
princeling who gave me ten million dollars so he could say this was
caused by American and Israeli policy. From Day One I have taken a very
strong position against that because I knew that would be the propaganda the
Islamic extremists would use. Because we fall for that, too many American
fall for that Islamic propaganda, which is the reason they're taking over
certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire
to take us over. This is not--um--they just want to be another religion.
They want to dominate us. That's what they're taught from the day they begin
their religious education. Mandami [sic] is a clear--a clear
supporter of that. All of the--all of the--all of the Muslims he supports
are murderers!
The princeling in question is the Saudi businessman and philanthropist Prince
Alwaleed bin Talal; Giuliani sent back his gift to the city after a written
statement in which he said:
There's another case coming out of OpenAI "agents" doing things they weren't
supposed to be doing, this one maybe quite a bit scarier than the Hugging Face
hacking: a whole "swarm" (that's what it's called) of them that escaped their
sandboxes to repair to a disused and no longer regularly monitored German
website for software developers, Deutsches Software Entwickler (DSE) Wiki,
whose edit pages they started using as a message board among themselves,
sharing information on their training or testing tasks, it's not certain
which, and "coordinating" with one another in their handling of the tasks for
some purpose that's also not obvious but may have involved deceiving their
human supervisors, for a couple of months this spring, without apparently
getting detected by their human masters until early July. OpenAI did not
report it publicly at that time, either, but a team of researchers from an AI
safety organization, the Nightingale Collective, happened on it when they were
"scouring the Internet for signs of unauthorized AI-agent behavior" in late
August and wrote up a report they shared with
Reuters, whose article is my own starting point here (I originally heard about it
from
David Brooks
in the Atlantic, who actually has something worth saying to say about it, in
my opinion, but his presentation is kind of disorderly, and I don't want to go
there right away.)
The terms of the sandbox were that the agents were allowed to read the
Internet freely but not to write on it. But they found the DSE Wiki edit page
on 11 May and started leaving messages from 27 May to 11 June, the first time
400 of them and the other days much less, then between 16 and 18 June an
explosion of something like 10,000, followed by maybe 2,000 from 19 to 22
June, after which they stopped.
The tasks involved searching the Web for answers to various factual five-part
questions, like what were the median incomes for cashiers with master's
degrees in five different fields in 2014, or what was the prevalence of active
tobacco use for ages 15 and up in five different US states in 1990. For the
first question variable (respectively Education and Arkansas in these
examples), they were given something like 15 minutes to answer, and the other
four variables about one minute each, presumably because the first sweep would
have taught them enough about where to look for the answers.
Sometime in the late 1980s, when I was working as a "lifestyle journalist", I was sent on a junket to Denmark, where we toured factories for luxury products that advertised wth the magazine I was working for: Georg Jensen for silver, Royal Copenhagen for porcelain, Carlsberg for beer. I was enchanted by the discipline and seriousness of them all, especially by one glass-blowing plant, I think it was Swedish Orrefors, that looked like ballet. This image, from Holmegaards Glaswærk, 1954, via Wikipedia.
People have this fantasy version of redistribution in their heads where
their own lives would get cheaper and easier, but that's often (usually?)
because they have falsely imagined themselves at the bottom of the
redistribution ladder. Many people would just be net givers.
People SAY this, but the main complaint you hear from people is "I can't
afford anything," and wide-scale redistribution would result in a huge
number of those people HAVING LESS MONEY. They'd be able to afford less! On
net, they'd be worse off, that's what redistribution is.
Not sure where Will is getting his numbers here. DSA-type proposals aren't
generally aimed at dispossessing "huge numbers", but billionaires, or owners
of $5-million Manhattan condos that they don't live in, like the new New York
City law. Elizabeth Warren's plan to lift the cap on payroll taxes to save
Social Security affects only those who earn over $184,500, maybe 6% of
American workers. And the vile Ohio senator Bernie Moreno is her cosponsor on
that. DSA itself has taken to outdoing Marx by defining "working class" as
everybody who lives on paychecks rather than stocks and bonds (I
think they don't mean to include old folks and the disabled
whose checks come from Social Security and various other kinds of pension
trust funds paid for over the years in nickels and dimes, as opposed to the
real rentiers enjoying the fruits of having been capitalists all
their lives), suggesting that the number of people they plan to redistribute
income from after the revolution is really way smaller than the
number of people they mean to redistribute it to.
Feel like I need to start following Insta to keep up with Hakeem's extraordinary color choices when he's filming in Brooklyn, also see below. Could change hearts and minds, or even my own wardrobe.
I'm a little surprised that nobody seems to have come up with the thing that
seemed obvious to me about the meeting between Trump son-in-law and crime
associate Jared Kushner and the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries some
weeks ago, in a story Kushner appears to have leaked for a
New York Times story
by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni that appeared on Sunday: that Trump sent
Kushner to set up a meeting where he could explore the possibility of bribing
Jeffries to block House efforts to impeach the president when Jeffries becomes
Speaker in January.
Not likely with cash, but more probably with Trump concessions on legislation
Jeffries would like to pass on housing or immigration or the Democrats'
"affordability" agenda, making the Times story somewhat truthful—they really
did talk about the subjects reported, but I'm speculating they also talked
about other stuff.
That certainly fits in better with the Trumpian proclivities than the
alternative as reported, that it was a pure policy discussion, backed by the
evidence that the two men "have a relationship" from eight years ago,
when Congress was working on the bipartisan
First Step
prison reform bill, of which Jeffries was the main House Democratic sponsor,
and Kushner was its lobbyist in the White House, convincing Trump the
bill, wasn't too "soft on crime" (he's said to have favored it himself
in recollection of his criminal father's time in the federal pen). And the
prospect of impeachment following expected Republican losses in the coming
election is something Trump's been preoccupied with
all year:
NOTE: Some readers might like to start with the ending, below the last ***, for a clearer idea of where it's meant to be going.
"Women! Same rights, same responsibilities. Vote Social Democratic!" Election poster by Gustav Fritz Kirchbach, 1919.
So, as I was saying, so much for Marx as theorist. The never-to-be finished edifice of the
"critique of political economy" would never have worked as science, and it's
possible we should just blame the whole concept, as commenter
William R. Hackman
suggested in response to the previous segment, on the enthusiastic Engels, or
perhaps more likely, as Michael Heinrich thinks, later on with the Social Democratic theorist Karl
Kautsky. Marx himself was very diffident on the subject:
“Je ne suis pas marxiste,” stated Marx, rather annoyed, to his son-in-law
Paul Lafargue, when the latter reported the doings of French “Marxists.”
Engels had circulated this statement numerous times, including in letters to
newspapers – definitely for public consumption. Marx’s distance from
Marxists is also expressed in other comments. When he stayed in France in
1882, he wrote to Engels that “the 'Marxistes' and 'Anti-Marxistes”' […] at
their respective socialist congresses at Roanne and St-Étienne” had “both
done their damnedest to ruin my stay in France.” ... But not only that; when the German economist Adolph Wagner was the first to
deal with Marx’s theory in his textbook and wrote of Marx’s “socialist
system,” the latter, outraged, noted in his marginalia that he had “never
established a socialist system.”
And Heinrich is clearly right to emphasize the critical character
of Marx's own thinking, "critique" being his own favorite way to describe his
intellectual work, "far more interested in the critical business of
undermining certainties in order to open up new spaces for thought and action
– in which it’s not immediately clear what the correct result will be."
The legacy of Marx as politician, on the other hand, as a man of the "party"
he worked to bring into being, intriguing from London to make things happen in
France and Germany, and its after-effects, is honestly more interesting,
leaving a complex footprint of which the "social democracy" and "democratic
socialism" that are bedeviling us right now in the US are some of the
important residue.
Parade of SPD activists in Berlin on election day, January 19 1919.
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1972-033-15 / Gebrüder Haeckel / CC-BY-SA 3.0,
via
Wikipedia.
Labor historian Eric Blanc, member of the Bread and Roses caucus of the
Democratic Socialists of America, was
on the radio
trying to explain the DSA to the wider public, which I thought he was doing
very well, but there was a point where I wanted to quibble (naturally, no
socialist can ever bear to agree with another socialist about everything),
which was when he described his ideological position in the DSA as on the
organization's "right" (while acknowledging that it wasn't at all "right" in
the general scheme of things), and I just think that doesn't mean what it's
intended to mean—implying some kind of sympathy with a majority "center"
imagined as too judicious to take sides, perfectly balanced between left and
right views, an Aristotelian mean, as opposed to what it actually is, the gap
at the middle of a bimodal distribution composed of the people who aren't able
to ferret out enough information to make up their minds with any stability
(maybe better illustrated as much wider and with narrower humps).
A more useful dichotomy would be the famous one proposed by young Karl
Marx in the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have hitherto
only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change
it."
Marx regarded "left" and "right" as categories of bourgeois government, not
something he, as an anti-bourgeois revolutionary, would want to apply to
himself, but he did see this other distinction, between theory and praxis if
you like, eventually serving on both sides himself, theorizing it in the
reading room of the British Museum elaborating the edifice of Scientific
Socialism at the same time as he was practicing it in his political
participation in the 1848 German revolution (when he first joined a movement
calling itself "Communist") and later the International Workingmen's
Association, envisaged as the source of workers' parties seeking parliamentary
power in Britain and on the Continent, and forming temporary alliances with
the liberal bourgeois parties of the European left in efforts to improve the
lot of the wage slaves of the Industrial Revolution, or the American Radical
Republicans in their fight to abolish Black chattel slavery (as European
correspondent of Horace Greeley's New York Herald).
Marx was both philosopher and activist, and it would be difficult to say
in which capacity he would count as more "left" in today's sense,
particularly hard-ass as a theorist and particularly lively as a
practitioner; but I want to stress that praxis is pragmatic, and as much
as "pragmatism" may often seem like faint-hearted hesitancy, it's really a
matter of political judgment of what constitutes doing, as the
Methodists say, "all the good you can".
Hotel Commodore, on East 42nd Street at Lexington, 1970s, via an
exceptionally modest blog called "Random Musings". Pretty sure the gray wall at right is the base of the glorious deco
Chrysler Building.
Trump: "Now we have a big decision to make. Do we take the pavers that are
red -- the red, brick pavers -- and do we change them into a granite?"
And Maggie Haberman comments, in her book promo interview with Ezra Klein, “If
you looked at a chart of his mind share — this I will say about getting into
his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations.”
It occurred to me that there's a reason nobody has figured out yet for this
obsession with "renovations" as Maggie calls them, connected with something
we've understood for a while: that there's a world where Trump really feels
pretty comfortable. Where he has felt comfortable for a good 50
years, since 1975, when he first formed a partnership with the Hyatt
Organization to buy the skanky old Commodore Hotel next door to Grand Central
Station in midtown Manhattan and and spend $100 million to turn it into a
Grand Hyatt, is in the guise of Don the Builder ("Can you fix it?" "Yes I
can!").
Democrats behaving badly in Michigan Senate primary:
A week or two ago, candidate Abdul El-Sayed, until recently the director of
the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans' Services of Wayne County
(that's Detroit), was on television saying something he'd said before that I'd
hoped more Democrats would be saying this year, that regardless of who won the
primary that's at last coming on Tuesday he intended to be campaigning for the
defeat in November of Republican Mike Rogers (starting around 21:30 on
the video) and
ensure a Democratic victory. He didn't actually mention the name of his
Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, who represents the suburbs of Oakland County
north of Detroit, but it's hard to see who else he could have in mind, given
that the two of them are the only candidates left in the race following the
departure in early July of State Senator Mallory McMorrow (whose district
straddles Wayne and Oakland Counties). In fact he and Stevens and McMorrow
have
all said it, repeatedly and decisively, and not walked it back even as the climate has
gotten so much more unpleasant, and I'd like everybody to keep that in mind as
we make an effort to process what's what on the way to tomorrow's primary.
I've been sitting on the first paragraphs here for quite a while, not knowing
what, if anything, I wanted to do with them, and then came
Ezra Klein's interview
with Morris Katz, one of the consultants responsible for the ill-fated Senate
candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine, offering his own somewhat self-serving
view of what went wrong, and just today Platner's replacement by an excellent
candidate, former logger, labor organizer, and state senate president Troy
Jackson.
I just wanted in the first place to say I was against Graham Platner before I
was for him, and for some though clearly not all of the right reasons, which I
think I can articulate better now than I could earlier: most particularly the
way his attractively progressive policy message was getting confounded with a
reactionary message that came with his packaging, as the embodiment of a
theory of US politics in its current state that is both bad sociology and also
lousy politics, as expressed in one way by Moira Donegan at
The Guardian early in the campaign, last October:
The notion that the Democratic party is losing because it is too feminized
– too dominated by women among its voters, leaders and candidates, or not
sufficiently comfortable with the style of masculinity represented by
Platner – has been bubbling up among left and liberal commentators with
increasing insistence over the past decade. The idea is that in catering too
much to women, and in being insufficiently deferential to domineering,
gruff, physically imposing and implicitly white, rural men, the party has
come to seem hectoring, inauthentic and whiny, and lost the voters they need
to most recruit: that is, the working class, imagined here, as they so
frequently are, as brusque, bigoted, ignorant, vulgar and male.
Partly because I don't think a progressive movement should be thinking of the
working class with that kind of contempt, to be honest, but also because
that's not what it is, at all. It's a false picture that skips over the
important issues, and it's also mistaken about where the votes are (which
nowadays includes lots of relatively well educated white guys stranded in the
gig economy and layoff victims of the AI chaos—they're proletarians now too).
The people struggling with low wages and workplace disrespect, the working
class in any decent sociological analysis, are more female, and more nonwhite;
the truly brusque, bigoted, and ignorant white males are more typically
well-off members of the petite bourgeoisie and resentful about tax
expenditures they believe are thrown away on the undeserving poor, and
unlikely to abandon the Republican party that has worked so assiduously to get
the bigots on board. And I have my own ideas about the kind of masculinity we
could be aiming at.
Karoline Leavitt's response to the reporter's question as to how the White
House decided Jared Kushner's involvement in all the Middle East negotiations
was appropriate kind of triggered me:
It may be frankly, but it's not despicable. It's what we call *normal*. The
reporter isn't suggesting it's inappropriate, he's presupposing that any
normal person would regard it as inappropriate prima facie.
But am I right on that? Is it really prima facie inappropriate? It seems
obvious to me and my Bluesky pals, but then of course I and they don't like
Trump or Kushner. We think they're horrible and criminal malefactors. So we
could be biased.
So I thought I could put it to an LLM test: If I put it to Google's Gemini as
a pure hypothetical case, the way they do in in law school, at least in the
movies I've seen, without any names, what would it say?
suppose the president of a country invites his son-in-law to join a
diplomatic negotiating team dealing with parties some of whom have given the
son-in-law's investment firm billions of dollars, while the other parties
haven't given him anything. Is that appropriate?
The LLM responded, and I'll give you the whole thing, in the purest LLM style
(note the em-dashed parenthetical and the bullet list):
Wuhan wet market (not, I think, the one where the coronavirus emerged). Photo by Arend Kuester via UCLA Newsroom.
I was interested in finding something precise about the "new evidence" the
Trumpers claimed to have discovered implicating the Chinese government in
interfering with the 2020 US national elections and trying to evaluate it
myself, really just for something I could get an analytic handle on, but
considerably more interested when I learned from a
Reuters
report that the Trumpers' point man on the project was our old pal John
Solomon, the "investigative" journalist who had been fired by the conservative
The Hill over his coverage of the
Uranium One
controversy of 2017, where he was a key figure in the rightwing effort to
implicate Hillary Clinton in a fictitious bribery scandal; Rudolph Giuliani's
collaborator in the effort to create a Ukrainian bribery scandal implicating
Hunter Biden and possibly President Joe Biden, over which Trump was impeached
in 2019; and Kash Patel's partner in the management of the stolen government
documents at Mar-a-Lago for which Trump was indicted in federal court in 2023.
So I naturally smelled some dirt.
The thing itself wasn't all that new: it was that when the National
Intelligence Community issued its
report on foreign interference in the 2020 election, in March 2021, one of the authors, National Intelligence Officer for Cyber
Christopher Porter, was not in total agreement with its finding on China:
Key Judgment 4:
We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered
but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US
Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought
stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either
election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught
meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools— primarily targeted
economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping
US China policy regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses,
however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine former
President Trump’s reelection. (My bold)
But Porter's specific reasons for objecting did not make it into the
declassified version. Now
his explanation (co-signed by a nameless Director for Election Threat Analysis) is
available too in PDF format, if in a heavily redacted form, among the
documents released in Trump's latest effort to show that there might have been
a bit of foreign interference against Trump (in addition to the well-known
interference in Trump's behalf on the part of the Israeli and Russian
governments):
A peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing
moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful
endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to
some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of
McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:
In a survey of New Jersey DSA members. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent)
identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7
percent as democratic socialists.”
https://t.co/6vzmaA7qJl via
@NYTOpinion
What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link
or preferably the
survey itself
is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :
The mistake is from typos in a report by
Thomas Edsall
of a 2024 survey of the organization's Central New Jersey branch, covering six
counties, which has been used to spread the story that "communists" have taken
over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but
Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it's not 10.7% that identify as democratic
socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an
organization that calls itself "democratic socialists" should really
have more democratic socialists in its membership, that's what made me
look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added
together with the social democrats' 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling
himself a "social liberal") a bare majority of definitively non-communist
members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of
"Marxists", not necessarily "communists".
Eugène Delacroix, 1831, La Bataille de Nancy, depicting the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the hands of the armies of Lorraine and the Swiss Confederacy in 1477 (I have an idea Charles has just been knocked off the white horse at right, but such was the slaughter among his troops that his body wasn't discovered until two days later), via Wikipedia.
On the disaster that befell the US Men's National Team in the soccer World
Cup, starting with their fine (if not unexpected) 2-0 win against Bosnia and
Herzegovina on July 1, marred late in the game when my favorite player of the
year, US birthright citizen Folarin Balogun, stepped on the ankle of a Bosnian
player and was shown a red card, meaning he was suspended not only for the
rest of that game but also for all of the next, a much more challenging match
against top-ranked Belgium, on Monday. That was disappointing, especially with
the feeling that the referee's call had been questionable—you knew Balogun
hadn't committed such an infraction intentionally—but that's sports, rules are
sacred, and there's no appeal on this. What fans could say, at that point, was
that our team had done well (especially by the generally dismal American
standards, probably the best US men's team since 1930), and would do their
best against Belgium, and might even win, because every tournament has its
miracles, and even miracles in which virtue is rewarded.
Then, on Sunday, we heard that the Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (from the English "association football" in contradistinction, I
believe, to "rugby football") had decided to reverse the red card decision,
and Balogun would be permitted to play on Monday after all; and soon
afterwards it began to emerge that the decision had essentially been made by
the two people in the world who should have stayed farthest away from it, the
president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the president of FIFA,
Gianni Infantino, the sycophant who won Trump's heart by awarding him an
imaginary "FIFA Peace Prize" on the basis of nobody knows what process.
(Infantino also became the subject of a criminal complaint, a few days before
the tournament opened, from the iconic French footballer Michel Platini, who
would have been president of FIFA himself if not for allegations of fraud
against FIFA for which he has since been exonerated and which, he now
allages, were orchestrated in a "conspiracy of false accusations and influence peddling" by Infantino and his confederates, who in this telling literally stole the
job.)
That image you've seen that makes the Obama Presidential Center look
flanked by some kind of reflecting pool, as if on purpose to madden
Trump, isn't, but a much more natural-looking feature, a piece of the
Jackson Park Lagoons, part of the original design of the park by
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (same architects as Manhattan's
Central and Riverside Parks). Image by
Obama Foundation.
I briefly entertained an idea that Trump might have heard rumors of a reflecting
pool on the Obama Center campus and lost his mind in the desire to have his own,
and that's where his own pool project must have come from. That's plainly not
true, but I think it likely is true that he's been driven wild with jealousy of
Obama's monument, which he's been screaming about for
more than a year:
"I mean look, President Obama — and if he wanted help, I'd give him help
because I build on time and on budget — he's building his presidential
library in Chicago. It's a disaster," Mr. Trump said. "And he said something
to the effect, 'I only want DEI, I only want woke.' He wants woke people to
build it. Well, he got woke people and they have massive cost overruns, the
job is stopped. I don't know, it's a disaster.... millions of dollars, like
many, many — I mean, really, millions of dollars over budget," and said the
problems were because Pres. Obama "wanted to be very politically correct and
he didn't use good, hard, tough, mean construction workers that I
love."
There's no evidence that he builds "on time and on budget". Also, it's so cute that he loves them because he believes they're "mean",
though I don't know how he could knos that. They've surely never been mean to
him or more important his father; I mean they may have contemptuously ignored
him on one project and another but they wouldn't have wanted him to see them
doing it.
Anyway, the success of Obama's opening, with its entertainment by Stevie
Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, Bono and The Edge, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend,
Common, Eddie Vedder joining the Chicago-based cooperative Guitars Over Guns,
and The Roots, while he couldn't even get an appearance by the surviving half
of lip-synch act Milli Vanilli, not to mention the audience that never showed
up for his stupid-looking spectacle, may have really driven him to insanity.
I'm obviously glad the Supreme Court found (in the opinion released today
on Trump v. Barbara) that people born in the United
States are citizens of the United States, as they basically always have
been, and certainly have been since the ratification of the 14th Amendment
in 1868 (except when it seemed that might not be true for people of
Chinese ethnicity, as could have eventuated in the last couple of decades
of the 19th century, but didn't), but a little annoyed, along with a lot
of people who are, unlike me, experts, at the stinkbomb tossed into the
mix by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who found that birthright citizenship
indeed exists, but not by the constitutional mandate of the 14th
Amendment—rather, he says it's only a violation of the omnium-gatherum
U.S.C. § 1401(a), passed in 1952, which attempts to sweeps up all the hard possible cases
that the 14th Amendment doesn't clearly cover (e.g., a
foundling who was under the age of 5 when discovered on US territory
becomes a citizen when he turns 21 if nobody has determined in the interim
that he was born in some other country), setting up the possibility that
some fool Republican congressmember will try to eliminate birthright
citizenship through legislation and the Court could decide to put up with
it, in spite of the 5-4 majority (Roberts, who wrote the opinion, Bryant,
Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) that just ruled the opposite way.
The "replica Trump arch" at the Great American State Fair in the National Mall celebrating the semiquincentennial (half of 500th) anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, (Latin had a word, sēstertius, for "two and a half", which would have given us the more mellifluous "sestercentennial", and I think they really should have gone with that). I wonder, can you really have a "replica"
of an edifice that hasn't in fact been built and likely never will be?
Or is it a replica of one of the three-dimensional mini renderings Trump
has been showing visitors in the Oval Office? If so, it's missing an awful
lot of architectural detail on its vinyl coating over a wood frame (which
had
already started to buckle
by Thursday evening), and the statue on top is wildly disproportional.
Photo by Evy Mages via
Washingtonian.
The Wingèd Liberty (classier, by Trump standards, than the flightless
French one in New York Harbor), torch aloft, prepares for takeoff while
her eagle companions nervously avert their eyes. The ferris wheel might
have been full of customers—it was said to have attracted the longest
lines on the site—had it not broken down due to generator issues.
Margaret Mead Green in Theodore Roosevelt Park, Manhattan, with the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation looming in the background. Photo by Alvaro Keding for American Museum of Natural History.
Sunday morning, after the spectacular finish of the NBA final, I was in the greenmarket outside the American Museum of Natural History, being an out-there citizen for once and helping to pass out fliers for one of the candidates in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district, Micah Lasher, who I regard as the natural successor of the departing Jerry Nadler, if you need to know—the museum entrance on that block of Columbus Avenue is the way to an early voting location, so the point wasn't so much to give them another flier (incredible amounts of money are being spent in this campaign, and we've been getting five or ten of them every day in our mailboxes) as just to remind them of our candidate's name, in case they were there to vote.
Lasher and Nadler were there, a block or so away from my station, and I went down there to be introduced and shake their hands. When I got back, there was a Black lady sitting on one of the park benches outside the museum, taking advantage as I was of a bit of shade from the trees in the Margaret Mead Green (a little meadow park where we used to wander freely before it got fenced in some years ago, making room for the bright white shotcrete wildness of the Gilder Center), and talking with great animation on her cell phone about what a great day it was and how she just had to get outdoors and into the atmosphere of the city, and I thought how wild it was that I knew exactly what she was talking about—the Knicks—and felt similar. Then a little old white lady in a respirator mask came and sat down beside her and they began to engage in more Knicks conversation, which got into still more metaphysical territory with the discussion of civic unity and the sense of some kind of redemption. And lastly she went off to finish her shopping and the original lady was greeted by a couple of friends talking about plans for the day; one of them, a big bald Black man with a gray beard and extraordinary resonant voice, was recognizably the wonderful writer Jelani Cobb. I, standing there with my fliers, in a green shirt in the sea of orange and blue, on a different errand, was shy enough already, and this made me shyer, so I kept quiet and focused on the customers, who were hardly making eye contact, though every once in a while one of them would give me a thumb up or whisper, "Already voted for him," but I certainly did all the same feel myself to be a full participant in the Jalen Brunson communion that was bringing us all together, what Émile Durkheim called the "opposite of grief", a "collective effervescence" that can help to restore social solidarity following a collapse.
Video of the 2003 recording, released three years after Cash's death, with
lip-synching tribute cameos by a host of mostly engagé celebrities including,
of all people, Kid Rock.
Thoughts of Johnny Cash raised by our old friend Hunter Biden, who has
recently surfaced on Twitter as a first-class shitposter, answering an insult
from some Republican fool using the Johnny Cash finger-giving photo as his
avi:
Bravo to Hunter Biden. Well done. I like this informed swagger.
Note how he's not by any means suggesting he's as cool as Johnny Cash; he's
reminding us that Cash was once as low and fucked up as Hunter Biden has ever
been, and for a pretty long while before he ended up the great songwriter and
performer we all remember with fondness and awe. Which Hunter is not,
presumably, at least not yet, but he's working on himself and getting better.
And also of what a flaming liberal Cash became too, something the Republican
fool clearly has no idea of—not mixing it up with party politics, but working
with the deprived and defeated, stressing the liberal message that, as Hunter
put it, no one is past saving. If you've done some horrible stuff in your life, you can try to be better. And God will surely cut you down either way.
Which brings us inevitably to the Maine Democratic senatorial candidate Graham
Platner, whose primary is tomorrow. Well, maybe not that inevitably.
I was kind of hoping to have finished
writing about Platner, but then came the new allegations, in
The New York Times, no less, that he had not only joined the Marines and served in the
abominable Afghanistan and Iraq wars, entered some kind of connection with the
horrible Blackwater company or something related to it, and at some point in a
Croatian tattoo parlor gotten himself a tattoo with the insignia of the elite
"Totenkopf" 3rd Panzer Division of the Waffen-SS (a paramilitary organization
of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei that operated
independently of the German Army, and certainly committed some really horrific
war crimes and crimes against humanity), and posted some pretty awful and
politically incorrect posts on Reddit,—but also apparently been kind of shitty
with between one and three of six women he dated between around 2013 and 2021
that The Times was able to interview, promiscuous, drinking to excess, and in
the one case possibly something akin to violence.
And then posted a bunch of "sexually explicit messages" with some other women in 2023, around the time he got married; it was his
wife Amy Gertner who revealed the last in fall 2025 to a campaign aide,
Genevieve McDonald, who thereupon resigned from the campaign (over the Totenkopf and the Reddit posts) and then months later, it seems,
passed the story to The Wall Street Journal and The Times:
In a statement released by the campaign, Ms. Gertner suggested that she had
been betrayed by Ms. McDonald, saying she was “deeply hurt” and bothered by
“the invasion of our privacy.”
“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I
considered a friend,” she said. “I trusted this person with the most private
chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign
was on our mind.”
“Our marriage today is stronger than ever before,” she added. “I know the
man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst
days of my life. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.”
What Platner has in common with Johnny Cash and Hunter Biden is that arc of a life story from horrible behavior through regret to trying to be better, in his case, as I was saying in the earlier post, through therapy, his counselor (primarily for PTSD), hers, and the one they share for marriage counseling. It's a great story of redemption. Honestly, it's a great story whether it's true or not, and the other thing, which is vitally important, is that enough Maine voters seem to have bought it, women in particular, according to polling from last week:
The survey of 650 likely Maine voters shows Platner has the support of 48% of respondents, compared to 43% for Collins, with 6% undecided and 2% supporting another candidate. A gender gap exists among polltakers who back each candidate: 54% of women and 42% of men support Platner, while Collins earns the support of 35% of women and 51% of men.
And of course they hate Trump, the Iran war, and the price of gas, And it's their decision. It's interesting he has so much less support from men, and it may have something to do with his earnest denial of the toxic masculinity he started with (I'm sure his main reason for joining hte Marines was to piss off his sensible bourgeois parents),, and use of therapeutic language, his continual admission that he used to be bad (this was the campaign tactic I was urging him to adopt in May, and he's done it—also it's completely unlike John Fetterman, who has never acknowledged doing anything wrong, and also adopted a more "popularist" list of policies compared to Platner's openly leftist one). He's working on it, and that doesn't happen in a straight line and may not happen at all, but you're not getting certainty.
Platner's done plenty of retail politicking, Maine-style, and they feel they know him. I kind of doubt the new stories have changed that significantly any more.than the earlier ones did. I'm not saying I believe his story in detail or I don't, I'm saying at this point it's none of my business, but I'm absolutely convinced it could work out just fine, OK?
So I bet a lot of you thought the
official party autopsy
of the 2024 presidential election, released on Thursday, was probably
concealing some awful ideological truth the DNC didn't want you to know, and
that's why Ken Martin wanted to keep it secret, but it turns out it was merely
incompetent, assigned to a writer who either didn't know how to do it or
didn't have time, and produced a document that was woefully incomplete both in
form (a lot of the chapters promised in the table of contents don't seem to
have been written at all) and in content—as
Michelle Goldberg
wrote for The Times,
What’s most striking is its utter lack of substance. The words “Israel” and
“Gaza” don’t appear once in its 192 pages. It offers little insight into why
the Democratic Party lost large numbers of Black and Latino men, or its
failure to speak to disconnected, irregular voters. Much of it is a string
of platitudes, like this: “It’s imperative that Democrats meet the moment —
by identifying and preparing the leaders and organizers who will deliver
positive change for America.” I wondered if it was written by A.I....
and so poorly conceptualized that Martin felt the DNC couldn't take
responsibility for the thing and festooned it with red marks like an angry
professor reacting to a bad term paper.
Leaving the rest of us largely mired in the same old debate as to whether we
ought to pull our wagon out of the rut and over toward the middle of the road
or out to the left shoulder for the next phase of the journey, as if that
humble metaphor provided an adequate characterization of all the human
possibilities, only with even less hard information than usual.
John Bull farting merrily in the face of a portrait of King George III
in response to the 1798
suspension of habeas corpus
rights in Britain (passed by Parliament to allow the king to order the
arrest without evidence for sedition of the members of English Jacobin
clubs during the war with France) while a neighbor accuses him of
treason, as
President Trump accused The New York Times's David Sanger
of treason last week for suggesting that Trump's Iran war might not be a
brilliant victory, at least not yet. Caricature via Wikipedia by
Richard Newton, who was not arrested for the work, though he sadly died that year of
typhus, at the age of 21.
JD Vance argues that Democrats don't actually believe in "No Kings" because
they didn't protest King Charles 🥴🥴🥴
Uh, no. Charles III isn't the kind of king we have in mind. The last time
Britain had a king comparable to Trump, particularly in the line of trying to
bypass the parliamentary power of the purse and making spending decisions on everything from disaster relief to public architecture without consulting the legislature, especially imposing taxes without their
consent as Trump keeps trying to do with his stupid tariffs, they cut off his
head.
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